Columns

When we were first married, my wife, Rhonda, and I lived on the south end of Louisville (the Iroquois Park/Fairdale areas). Generally speaking, the folks that live in those areas would fit very nicely into a Jeff Foxworthy routine, and we fit in rather well with them.

One Christmas, we and a few other couples decided to go out for a night of high culture, which for us normally meant an evening at the softball park followed by pizza, or if we were really feeling sophisticated, bowling and dinner at Po’ Folks or Big Boy.

Our universe is in apple pie order again. Wrong returns to right. Surreal reverts to real. Upside down is right side up, and forward is the motion, not reverse.

Some of you feel it, too, because you are devotees of Shelby County Rockets basketball, and ever since that new school opened out west, well, the Rocket Pride and the history of greatness have sort of become a footnote in the bigger swings of life.

In the middle of the first century AD a rather heated theological quarrel raged among the members of the early church. The church was quickly moving from its Jewish roots and locale in Jerusalem and into the larger Roman world, and as it did, there were many questions about how to live in and relate to a society with beliefs and practices that stood in marked contrast to the burgeoning Christian movement.

Perhaps it is appropriate that in the month we celebrate African-American history that this week we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the historic rise to prominence of one Cassius Clay, the boxer and not the abolitionist for whom he was named, the man famous worldwide as Muhammad Ali.

And there are few persons I can identify during my lifetime who did more to span the great divide between races, to bring focus and discussion to the principles that Martin Luther King had preached.

In my last column, I began by quoting Thomas Sowell, who said that “it takes a high IQ to evade the obvious” as a commentary on all manner of things that I believe are (or should be) intuitively obvious to reasonable people but that supposedly highly intelligent people try to explain away by using all sorts of sophisticated buffoonery. I then went on to use the recent debate about human origins between Bill Nye, “the science guy.” and Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis in Northern Kentucky, as a perfect example of this phenomenon.

Thinking about death is not easy, especially when it is the prospect of your own. When one considers the complicated nature of the dying process in this time of highly advanced medical technology, however, it is of vital importance that people consider how they want to deal with end-of-life care.

What do you need to know in order to prepare for your own end-of-life care? There are several matters to which every person should direct their attention, the first being the importance of talking about their wishes with their loved ones.

I could fill up an entire newspaper with my confessions, especially if I embraced the “good for the soul” argument, but this one will shock many who know me or who have been around me for more than a few laps:

I was a slow adaptor when it came to the Beatles.

Yes, those beloved Beatles, the ones whose music courses through the tone-deaf chambers of my brain.

I have often used Thomas Sowell’s quote, “It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious,” as a commentary on all manner of things that are (or should be) intuitively obvious to reasonable people but that supposedly highly intelligent people try to explain away by using all sorts of sophisticated buffoonery.

In my last column I wrote that there comes a time to turn off life support mechanisms (which support what I called “artificial life”) and thus allow a person to pass away. It is, I believe, the compassionate and proper step to take in some situations. The next logical question is to ask, what about euthanasia?

Euthanasia is, according to the American Medical Association, “the administration of a lethal agent by another person to a patient for the purpose of relieving the patient’s intolerable and incurable suffering.”